Thursday, July 25, 2013

Dreaming in a Crack

Original Facebook post here.Today's formative-album replay: Sonic Youth, Goo. Released a full year before Nirvana's Nevermind, this sprawling, surefooted major-label debut by these New York No Wavers had a much bigger impact on me than any from the Subpop catalogue. It may be heretical to see these art-punk songs through a pop lens, but for me the fretless four-note motif that anchors "Dirty Boots," or the chromatic surge between the chorus lines of "Kool Thing" ("I don't wanna/I don't think so"), are earworms as hardy as any on a bubblegum pop record, and the gamut of guitar effects--the headstock harmonics, whammy-bar boings, feedback ebbs and swells--sound to me as carefully and catchily placed as the production on classic Motown or Pet Sounds.Of course, these meticulous touches are employed to create a minor-key blur that's the opposite of conventional "pop," but at its best this record really grooves in a way most hard rock seldom does. With the beatbox sheen of Steve Shelley's drums undergirding the heavy guitar superstructure, much of this record lurches forward like a bobblehead: giant guitar swoops propped up by a nimble, dancing beat.

I will admit that, as with Talking Heads' Naked, there's a big divide for me between this record's sides 1 and 2--I've never really warmed up to the latter's more dissonant gestures, especially as compared to the perfection of the album's first five tunes, which hurtle forward like a fast car, only to crash and burn into the time-stopping noisescape of "Mote." On this revisit, I tried to give the last six tunes a fighting chance, and found a few lifelines: the chiming major-key epiphany that lifts "Cinderella's Big Score," the artful two-guitar weave of "Disappearer." Even so, the first five spurts of Goo are the ones that stick with me. BONUS: I tracked down the odd Kim Gordon/LL Cool J interview that inspired "Kool Thing."

Rob Weinert-KendtThe only "funk" we created was the smell of that hot little room in Bake's house.

Jason Benjamintotally with you, Rob. Sonic Youth had a way bigger impact on me than anything on Sub Pop, and I owe it all to Goo. And the first impression was accurate: all of their albums are half-great, half-boring